Wellframe: Supporting people outside the four walls through digital health management

About Wellframe

The Wellframe digital health management solution supports the comprehensive needs of patients beyond the walls of care delivery. Wellframe translates evidence-based, peer-reviewed guidelines and provides an interactive daily checklist delivered to patients through the Wellframe mobile app. As patients engage with the Wellframe app, their data is shared in real time with their care team through the care team dashboard to generate early intervention alerts.

About Looker

Looker, a Google Cloud Technology Partner, offers data analytics and big data services to customers through its business intelligence platform. Looker is based in California with additional offices in New York City, London, and Dublin.

Wellframe uses Google Cloud Platform to power its platform, which connects people and care teams to help them build trusted relationships that drive early interventions.

Google Cloud Results

Enables rapid development and deployment of machine learning into clinical practice

Powers delivery of ML features into production through Cloud APIs and supports retraining for healthcare domain specificity for improvement

Supports the Wellframe platform, which helps reduce patient care costs by up to $2,000 by improving efficiency and effectiveness of care management

Creates 10x average return on care management investment for payers and providers

80% increase in weekly patient care plan engagement

Managing one's own health can often become a full-time job for people with significant medical conditions. Whether it's remembering to take medications, understanding symptoms, or scheduling appointments, patients with chronic conditions have to juggle many tasks to remain healthy. Providers face similar logistics challenges on the other side of the healthcare process, as they manage a large volume of patients and develop treatment strategies that fit each individual's needs without an effective means to work with patients between visits or admissions.

Wellframe sought to improve healthcare for patients and providers through its care platform. With the Wellframe mobile app, patients have an adaptive checklist that is personalized to their conditions and guides them through daily care. Providers and health plans use the Wellframe platform as a self-prioritizing inbox that helps them visualize care urgency and maximize the number of patients that they can assist daily. But to power the Wellframe platform, the company faced a series of delivery and back-end challenges.

"We need to have a mobile component for patients," says Trishan Panch, M.D. MPH, Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at Wellframe. "We also have a significant infrastructure need to manage patient interactions in real time in a highly secure environment — then add to that massive amounts of provider data, including medical records and administrative claims."

With Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Wellframe has an end-to-end solution that matches its performance needs and provides a roadmap for future innovation. By combining patient data with analytics to an unparalleled degree within the healthcare space, Wellframe helps improve how providers deliver care and the services patients receive while maintaining industry-grade data security standards.

"We didn't want to have a lot of administrative overhead. Google Cloud Platform allows us to focus on platform investment. There was no need to hire a dedicated staff solely to maintain hardware, and that has been beneficial for us."

—Mohammad Jouni, Head of Engineering, Wellframe

Google Cloud Technology Partner Looker plays a vital role for Wellframe and its analytics needs. Looker helps Wellframe democratize access to data and data science inside its platform. Finance, marketing, product, engineering, and customer support will use operational dashboards and reports to guide day-to-day decision making. This data access will allow Wellframe teams to act quickly to help support partners and patients on its platform. Looker is used by the data science team, and Wellframe is in the process of training the rest of the organization to start using it to self-serve analytical needs.

Wellframe's data architecture

GCP flexibility enables Wellframe to anticipate growth without over-provisioning its platform, as the company has had to triple its cluster nodes to support increasing customer demand. Wellframe customers include Blue Cross Blue Shield and Medicaid across the United States, which together cover nearly 10 million patients.

"We didn't want to have a lot of administrative overhead. Google Cloud Platform allows us to focus on platform investment," says Mohammad Jouni, Head of Engineering at Wellframe. "There was no need to hire a dedicated staff solely to maintain hardware, and that has been beneficial for us."

Helping providers save time

A key part of the Wellframe approach is complementing and working alongside medical providers to improve the effectiveness of patient care, particularly by addressing barriers to care. For instance, the Wellframe app uses Translation API to translate messages between clinicians and patients in real time, which has significant potential in regions with large non-English speaking populations and high prevalence of complex clinical needs. Future deployments include natural language processing to provide real-time decision support to clinicians and identify patient health trends, and machine learning applications to preemptively target clinical resources at those patients most likely to benefit: effectively making sure the right patient gets the right intervention at the right time.

"Wellframe is driven by collaborative data science and it would be impossible to realize its value without Google Cloud Platform."

The centerpiece of the Wellframe platform is its data science capacity, which draws heavily on GCP and its big data solutions. Within Cloud Datalab and BigQuery, Wellframe can continually process client files including actuarial, claims, and medical data from millions of provider patients. All of the data pipelines are processed via Python jobs, which results in a database that gives providers extensive detail into patient conditions to support enhanced care through the Wellframe dashboard. For example, healthcare providers could potentially search through Wellframe to help identify patients who have emergent needs or are at the highest risk of non-compliance with care.

Automating care intelligence empowers Wellframe providers to scale care delivery and optimize care strategy. As a result, a case manager who previously might have been able to manage 50 patients could effectively handle hundreds of patients, responding as needed to people's specific needs. Wellframe has already seen an 80 percent increase in weekly patient plan engagement, driving care improvements for providers, health plans, and clinicians.

"Wellframe is driven by collaborative data science and it would be impossible to realize its value without Google Cloud Platform," says Trishan. "BigQuery and Cloud Datalab in particular have been game changers, as they've allowed us to build a collaborative data science process that involves clinicians, academics, engineers, and data scientists working together."

Redefining patient care

Through Wellframe, patients benefit from providers who are better versed in their individual care journeys. The company estimates that discharged patients who are engaged with a clinician and a personalized adaptive care plan through Wellframe have a reduction in care costs of up to $2,000.

"On average, providers and health plans can see a 10x increase in return on patient care investment," says Trishan.

Having a greater understanding of patient needs through analytics insights help enable providers to detect early conditions before they balloon and require costly emergency or in-patient care. "Providers can create a level of patient care that is responsive and valuable. With Google Cloud Platform, we have a system that is a significant enabler and amplifier of our engineering and data science work and enables us to deliver value to patients and in so doing deliver value to our customers," says Trishan.

About Wellframe

The Wellframe digital health management solution supports the comprehensive needs of patients beyond the walls of care delivery. Wellframe translates evidence-based, peer-reviewed guidelines and provides an interactive daily checklist delivered to patients through the Wellframe mobile app. As patients engage with the Wellframe app, their data is shared in real time with their care team through the care team dashboard to generate early intervention alerts.

Industries:Healthcare

Location: United States

About Looker

Looker, a Google Cloud Technology Partner, offers data analytics and big data services to customers through its business intelligence platform. Looker is based in California with additional offices in New York City, London, and Dublin.